'The British Gambling Prevalence Survey 2010 said 900,000 adults were at risk of becoming problem gamblers and 450,000 people admitted they already had a problem.' Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Getty Images

Last April my father walked into the living room one Thursday night and revealed that the next day he would be taking a trip to court. He had previously told us he would be going off for a work training course over the weekend, but it turned out that this was a cover story for a massive secret he had been hiding from us for nearly 30 years.

He was to receive a sentence for fraud, a charge he said he had pleaded guilty to. It was absolutely astounding. This man who we’d loved and trusted as a father, as a husband to my mum and as a respected figure in our community, had committed fraud?

According to him, he had mismanaged some finances while working away in Wales two years before. He believed he would receive a suspended sentence. But his solicitor called us after the hearing on the Friday to tell us that our dad was in the back of a van on the way to prison. He had been given a two-year term.

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As a family we were completely in the dark, not even knowing who we paid the household bills to, when they needed to be paid or how much. We didn’t even know why our father had gone to jail.

The local paper soon revealed that my father had stolen £53,000 from his employers to fund a secret gambling habit. He had been compulsively gambling online to try to win enough money to pay off a spiralling debt. When his household bills started coming through the door, they were in arrears too. We also discovered he had remortgaged the family home to the hilt, with an outstanding balance of more than £302,000.

My dad was released early from jail in November 2014 and is now getting support to keep his addiction at bay. While he has a long way to go – and so do we all as a family – he now recognises that he had a serious addiction that made him ill and impeded his judgment. Like any addiction, gambling affects your mental state, your decisions and your mood.

A measly £6m is donated by the industry to charities and research aiming to tackle the problem and curb gambling addictions. Against the backdrop of the industry’s turnover of billions of pounds, this figure could be much higher. The British Gambling Prevalence Survey 2010 (the last one before its funding was cut) said 900,000 adults were at risk of becoming problem gamblers and 450,000 people admitted they already had a problem. Many more would not even realise they had a problem.

While other EU countries such as France are tightening regulations, the UK seems to be lagging behind. Could this be because of the government’s need to cover the deficit? This industry fuels addiction, but remember that taxes from its profits do help our country survive.

On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this week, I called on all seven main political leaders to do the following: curb the advertising of gambling, cut the “free bets” promotions, introduce a watershed to apply to these advertisements, ask the industry and banks to work together to monitor users’ spending patterns and detect problem behaviour early, and talk more publicly about gambling addiction.

The politicians are yet to respond, but I know from personal experience that there needs to be stricter regulation and control over this problematic industry.